


The Secret Inner Life of Moira O’Deorain

by saraph



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: And she has a lot to say, Eventual Romance, F/F, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Gen, Humor, Moira talks about her life, Some Plot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2019-06-05 11:47:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15170081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saraph/pseuds/saraph
Summary: I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a good person by any conventional standard.I’m the kind of person who will frantically hammer the “close” button in an elevator to prevent a stranger coming down the hall from getting on with me. I jaywalk constantly. I may have violated the Third Geneva Convention’s stipulations on international humanitarian law. And you know when you pay for coffee on an iPad, and you can choose how much to tip the cashier? I will say I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I always select “No Tip.”Oh, and I don’t particularly like babies.





	The Secret Inner Life of Moira O’Deorain

     I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a good person by any conventional standard.

     I’m the kind of person who will frantically hammer the “close” button in an elevator to prevent a stranger coming down the hall from getting on with me. I jaywalk constantly. I may have violated the Third Geneva Convention’s stipulations on international humanitarian law. And you know when you pay for coffee on an iPad, and you can choose how much to tip the cashier? I will say I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I always select “No Tip.”

     Oh, and I don’t particularly like babies. Which, in some people’s minds, makes me a cold, unfeeling monster. When I see some new parents with a baby, I don’t think, _Aww, there goes a little bundle of joy. Thank God for the miracle of life._ I think about overpopulation, and the rather inconvenient fact that there just aren’t enough resources on this earth around to sustain ten billion humans. Almost all the woes of mankind – food and water shortages, environmental devastation, runaway energy consumption – can be traced back to there being too many people on the planet. And here come Sam and Kate, with another mouth to feed.

     Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate babies either. I just think that the majority of people are too blinded by hormones and emotions to realize the objective fact that babies are just small, vomit-prone little humans who will make no adequate contribution to society for the next several years until they reach adulthood. And then, they will probably be just as terrible as the rest of us.

     Case in point? Several years ago, when I was still finishing my Ph.D. at Oxford, I was invited to Kent for the baby shower of a niece of mine. Emily, I think her name was. I’m pretty sure it was Emily, but maybe it was Evelyn. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter.

     I was right to think that I was wrong to come, as most of the party was god-awful. I absolutely refused to hold the baby. But what I remember most about it is that at one point, we played this game where we all went around in a circle and said what we thought the kid would be when she grew up. Emily’s grandmother was sitting next to me and said that she hoped that the girl would grow up to be the mayor of London, or even the Prime Minister.

     For whatever reason, this wild conjecturing really stuck in my craw. So when it got to be my turn, I told the group that there was just not enough data to adequately predict the trajectory of Emily’s life within any acceptable degree of accuracy. But even so, Grandma’s hypothesis was highly improbable, because only the merest 0.01% of the population rose to become politicians and presidents. In contrast, an exponentially greater 0.1% of the United Kingdom was incarcerated each year for violent crime. So it was statistically much more likely that Emily would spend a portion of her life in federal prison than it was for her to become the Prime Minister.

     Kate O’Deorain threw me out of the house, and to this day I don’t hear much from Emily’s side of the family.

     Somehow, they’re still the family that I like the most. My father is an alcoholic, and I don’t like to talk about it. It’s not because I’m traumatized or ashamed or anything like that, but rather because it seems like a very Irish thing to say. As someone with flaming red hair, I learned early on that I had to watch my step around information like this. First people see your hair, then they learn that your dad drank too much. Then all of a sudden you’re a national stereotype, and everyone's expecting you to pull a rosary out of your pocket and dance a jig.

     Angela says that I should get back in touch with my father, that alcoholism takes years off a man’s life and he might not have that much time left. Then again, I distinctly remember that when she said that to me, it was two in the morning in our shared laboratory and she was wearing fuzzy Christmas socks and Crocs sandals and was eating a slice of Hawaiian pizza, in flagrant violation of all rules of fashion, cuisine, and lab safety. So I made the conscious decision that I wasn’t going to take anything that she was saying seriously at all.

     Plus, Angela also doesn’t seem to realize that it smacks of alcoholism to have a swig of tequila before noon on a workday. She thinks that people don’t know about it and most people don’t, but I do. When you spend enough time with someone, you notice these things. It started a few months ago and it’s not exactly the sort of thing that becomes a medical professional, but I have to admit that I liked her a little more after finding out. She had been on the high road for so long that it was nice of her to finally join the rest of us on the low road.

     For most of the time I knew her, Dr. Angela Ziegler had been the golden girl of Overwatch. She always held the elevator door open, and never jaywalked. She has most certainly never broken the Third Geneva Convention’s stipulations on international humanitarian law. And I’m pretty sure that she always tips 5% or more at cafes. Maybe even 10%.

     Needless to say, we are two fundamentally different human beings.

     It was a rough first couple of months, when Jack Morrison forced us into the same laboratory at Watchpoint Gibraltar. It was a small base, he said. We would have to make do. There just wasn’t enough room for us in the lower floors. Overwatch was stretched to capacity.

     I asked him if Gabriel Reyes was also stretched to capacity. He just walked away from me.

     Angela hated the new arrangement because she didn’t like me as a person. By then I had already had something of an ill reputation in the scientific community, and she wasn’t keen to taint her good name through extended proximity to the infamous Dr. O’Deorain. As for me, I was completely apathetic to her as a person. But I soon grew to hate the situation too, as I learned that I couldn’t smoke cigarettes in my office anymore because she would report me.

     But after a good long while, we stopped fighting and phased into a new status quo of grudging respect. She realized that there was more to me than just my controversial publications. On my part, I realized that there weren’t any male scientists working in the laboratory wing of Gibraltar. If I went down to the disused men’s restroom, stood on a toilet, and smoked into a vent, Angela would never know or come to bother me about it.

     And then we got to talking more, and before I knew it I was telling her about the time I went to the local pub at 4 AM and tried to balance my father’s limp body across the handlebars of my bicycle because I was too young to actually drive him home. And in turn, she loosened up around me too. It’s hard to say when medical prodigy Angela Ziegler became socks-and-sandals wearing, pineapple pizza-eating, tequila-guzzling medical prodigy Angela Ziegler. But she wasn’t bad company.

     These days, Jack Morrison says I’m a bad influence on Angela. But I think Angela’s a bad influence on me. The other day, she saved a slice of pizza for me and told me it was pepperoni. I’d just pulled an all-nighter, and I was so tired that I ate half of it before realizing that it was actually Hawaiian.

     It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I ate the rest of it. Angela laughed and laughed.

     And I thought that maybe, just maybe, I could begin to call Angela Ziegler my friend.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have two modes - gay humor and [gay angst](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14853842/chapters/34386260). And I'm all out of angst.
> 
> Moira O'Deorain has this lovely wit that we don't talk about nearly enough.
> 
> Find me on [DA](https://www.deviantart.com/kittify) and [Tumblr](http://the-moirigan.tumblr.com/)!


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